Once the special hunt permit results were posted this summer I saw that I had gotten drawn for a Dayton cow tag and thought that I would be writing a story on here about the cow that I was going to shoot. Well after coming close every day I went out hunting I ended up getting skunked. I only got to hunt the weekends because I decided to be a good student and go back to school during the week. My dad and the rest of the people that we hunt with stayed up there all week and he kept me posted every night on what they saw. On Wednesday (Nov. 3rd) my dad called and told me a story that I felt was very worthy of posting on here.
The night before 2 of the guys we were hunting with saw a heard of elk that had 3 spikes in it so they put together a plan to try to get them. They headed out in the morning and one of the guys actually got a shot off at one. They checked around where the elk was and he actually took some hair off of it, but there was no blood at all. Later in the day everybody had split up and my dad reached the spot where they were going to meet up first so he decided to take a bit of a break. He sat down to have a candy bar and said that his feet were really sweaty so he decided to take his boots off and let his feet air out. He actually even decided to take his socks off while he was at it. He was sitting there for a couple of minutes when over the radio one of the guys said that there were some elk heading towards the “big tree”. My dad then realized hey I’m at the big tree!! He quickly grabbed his rifle and stood up and looked to see nothing around him. He decided that he should probably put his boots back on in case an elk actually does show up. Well he was only able to put on one sock before he heard some crashing coming his way and as luck would have it a spike walked out right in front of him! He put the crosshairs on his chest and let him have it! Before he was even able to chamber another round the elk was out of sight and all that my dad heard was a bunch of crashing and another shot from one of our hunting partners. After that he put his boots on and while he was lacing them up one of our friends showed up and they didn’t have to walk more than 100 yards until they were until they found him laying there dead. After all the work was done my dad paced it out and the spike was only 17 steps away when he shot it!
That ended up being the only elk we got in camp that year, but everybody had a blast and can’t wait to see what next season has to offer. I showed my dad the picture of the bull that rosscrazyelk shot in the same unit and he said that he actually saw him and they both said congrats to each other. The spikes on my dad’s bull were 22 and 25 inches long.
